He was alone with Mary.

“Who?  Ally?  No.  She isn’t silent at all.  What do you think of her?”

“I think,” said Rowcliffe, “she looks extraordinarily well.”

“That’s owing to you,” said Mary.  “I never saw her pull round so fast before.”

“No?  I assure you,” said Rowcliffe, “I haven’t anything to do with it.”  He was very stiff and cold and stern.

Rowcliffe was annoyed because it was two Wednesdays running that he had found himself alone with the eldest and the youngest Miss Cartaret.  The second one had gone off heaven knew where.

XXI

The Vicar of Garth considered himself unhappy (to say the least of it) in his three children, but he had never asked himself what, after all, would he have done without them?  After all (as they had frequently reminded themselves), without them he could never have lived comfortably on his income.  They did the work and saved him the expenses of a second servant, a housekeeper, an under-gardener, an organist and two curates.

The three divided the work of the Vicarage and parish, according to the tastes and abilities of each.  At home Mary kept the house and did the sewing.  Gwenda looked after the gray and barren garden, she trimmed the narrow paths and the one flower-bed and mowed the small square of grass between.  Alice trailed through the lower rooms, dusting furniture feebly; she gathered and arranged the flowers when there were any in the bed.  Outside, Mary, being sweet and good, taught in the boys’ Sunday-school; Alice, because she was fond of children, had the infants.  For the rest, Mary, who was lazy, had taken over that small portion of the village that was not Baptist or Wesleyan or Congregational.  Gwenda, for her own amusement, and regardless of sect and creed, the hopelessly distant hamlets and the farms scattered on the long, raking hillsides and the moors.  Alice declared herself satisfied with her dominion over the organ and the village choir.

Alice was behaving like an angel in her Paradise.  No longer listless and sullen, she swept through the house with an angel’s energy.  A benign, untiring angel sat at the organ and controlled the violent voices of the choir.

The choir looked upon Ally’s innocent art with pride and admiration and amusement.  It tickled them to see those little milk-white hands grappling with organ pieces that had beaten the old schoolmaster.

Ally enjoyed the pride and admiration of the choir and was unaware of its amusement.  She enjoyed the importance of her office.  She enjoyed the massive, voluptuous vibrations that made her body a vehicle for the organ’s surging and tremendous soul.  Ally’s body had become a more and more tremulous, a more sensitive and perfect medium for vibrations.  She would not have missed one choir practice or one service.

And she said to herself, “I may be a fool, but Papa or the parish would have to pay an organist at least forty pounds a year.  It costs less to keep me.  So he needn’t talk.”